Albert Memmi famously denied the existence of the ‘colonial’ or the ‘colonizer who refuses’. There was only the colonizer, inextricably implicated in a project to exploit the colonized through privilege, prestige, and power. Memmi’s conclusion left little room for individual agency, policy change, or colonial reform. Certainly, the official, imperial narrative had an impact upon colonial culture. In Egypt Cromer, Milner, and Lloyd composed a public narrative and a public memory of Britain’s imperial mission in the Middle East. That memory was guarded by many in British public life, notably Winston Churchill. However, the private letters, memoirs, and public writings of T. E. Lawrence and John de Vere Loder are investigated in this paper to measure the reality of the colonial experience against the rhetoric of imperial narratives. For instance, T. E. Lawrence did not ‘refuse’ the policy of his government during and after the First World War, but he disagreed and plotted out an alternative. In this sense he was implicated in the larger project but determined to reform it through ‘para-colonial’ activity, such as his relationships with individuals involved in the ‘Arab Revolt’, like Faysal, or through cultural work in Britain, notably the publication of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Likewise, John de Vere Loder’s diaries record his immersion in Egyptian life, attraction to Levantine culture, and disillusion with British policy in the Middle East while serving as an intelligence officer during the First World War. These experiences resulted in his conversion to internationalism and his writing of a critical assessment of the imperial narrative in his The Truth about Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Syria.